Lilian Darcy - Her Sister's Child

“They agreed they’d each take one of us. I went with Dad,” she said, “while Cherie stayed with Mom. I’ve always felt guilty about that.”

“Guilty?”

“I got the better deal. I don’t know if she told you much about her childhood…”

“Bits,” Adam replied. “Like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Snatches of color and tone that I couldn’t ever put together as well as I wanted, because she never gave me the whole picture.”

Again, Meg gave that faint, weary smile. “That’s Cherie. Mom was the same. Constantly in search of some new dream, but never slowing down long enough to explain to anyone quite what it was. It took her all over the country, with Cherie in tow, moving once, even twice a year. Dad got frantic at first. He never knew, when he called, if the phone would be disconnected. He never knew if his plans to see Cherie during school vacations would get cancelled at the last minute because they’d moved on again and hadn’t given us the new address. At some point, I think, he gave up.” She stopped.

“Gave up?” Adam prompted. He was learning an incredible amount about this complex, sensitive woman just from the way she was telling the story. He could feel his attitude and his emotions changing every minute. Right now, he was too caught up in Meg’s words to think about what that really meant.

“Kind of encased his love for Cherie in a thick layer of cement so it couldn’t do him damage. Like nuclear waste, or something.” She spread her fine hands helplessly, as if asking him to indulge the clumsy comparison.

“I think I understand.”

“It just hurt too much,” she went on. “He’s an organized, sensible man, while my Mom—she died several years ago—was…” She looked up again, and this time her smile was wider, though just as complicated. The wisdom in what she said belonged to someone much older. “Well, let’s just say, don’t let anyone tell you that opposites attract!”

“No?” Adam was thinking of Cherie. Cherie and himself and that first, chance meeting of theirs in a Philadelphia shopping mall. A disastrous quirk of fate in so many ways, yet how could he wish it had never happened? He couldn’t.

“Well, okay, maybe they do attract,” Meg conceded. “In the beginning. That was the case with Mom and Dad, at first, and they were as opposite as it comes. But opposites can’t make it last, when it comes to a relationship.”

“That, I agree with.”

“So I grew up not knowing my sister, and hardly knowing my mom. It was…incredible to find out that Cherie had a child. How did you track Dad down? We were confused, at first, because you’d gotten the name wrong, and all.”

My turn to bare my soul, Adam thought.

But some instinct told him not to, just yet, not fully. For a start, he definitely wasn’t going to talk about Amy’s illness yet, and what she needed. There was time for that, and it was too important to get it wrong. He distrusted this lawyer, he reminded himself firmly. Despite the endearing fact that she couldn’t serve coffee and that she could speak to a stranger like him from the heart.

Scratch the surface, and she was probably cut from the same cloth as his former college roommate, Garry, who seduced my girlfriend behind my back and then laughed when I found out and told me to “join the real world,” he remembered.

The guy was a celebrity defense lawyer now. “The guiltier my clients, the happier I’ll be,” he used to say. “They’ll pay more that way.”

For this woman, did it come down to money, too?

“I needed to get in touch with Cherie,” he said, deliberately avoiding detail. “But I didn’t know how. I tried her old modeling agency, but they hadn’t kept any records and they didn’t want to know. They weren’t exactly a top-flight establishment. They only had a few staff members to handle all their clients and their wannabes. And I think they’d written Cherie off.”

“Perhaps a few of us had,” she came in quietly. “You, too?”

“I…didn’t think to try a bigger, better agency, no,” Adam admitted. “After Amy was born…or even before…Cherie seemed like she was headed on the opposite trajectory. Down, not up.”

“I know,” Meg nodded. “That was the one thing that made her death easier for Dad. That she’d turned her life around. That she died doing what she had wanted to do, and was on the edge of real success.”

“So I was just about to put the whole thing in the hands of a private investigator. I even wondered if she might be living on the streets.”

“I know,” Meg nodded again. “We’ve had those fears, too, in the past.”

“Then I was flipping through an old notepad by my phone and I caught sight of her handwriting, and there it was. Just a scribble. It had to be well over a year old, and I could hardly read it. ‘Dad in ’Frisco after November 1st.’ Something like that, followed by his address. She hadn’t mentioned him often. I didn’t know if she was still in touch with him. But it seemed like the best lead I had, so I tried it. I just addressed it to ‘Mr. Fontaine.’ I never knew Fontaine was only Cherie’s professional name.”

“Her legal one, too, for most of her life. Mom had it changed officially when she was seven. It was meant to help Cherie’s modeling career, as well.”

“Part of Amy’s name, too. Amy Fontaine Callahan.” He said the “Callahan” part with deliberate emphasis, claiming his child. Amy was a Callahan, and she would stay a Callahan. His.

Was the pretty lawyer, Cherie’s sister, trying to soften him up? Of course she was! He distrusted her. He must not lose sight of that fact. He’d trusted Cherie at first, too, believing that she was as bright and sincere and in control of her life as she’d then seemed.

They didn’t look alike, the two sisters. They had the same mouth, that was all. Cherie had been model-perfect, with a lifetime of training in how to be beautiful, thanks to the roll call of pageants her mother had pushed her through for years. By twenty, when he’d met her—although initially she’d lied and told him she was twenty-four—she had a model’s tall, lean build, wide sultry eyes, carefully graceful movements and gorgeous, pouting mouth.

Yes, Meg definitely had the same mouth. The rest of her was different, though. She wasn’t blond. She wasn’t as tall, and she wasn’t as lean. Her blue suit covered some very feminine curves. And you couldn’t really say she was beautiful. These days, beauty wasn’t an innocent quality, and in Meg Jonas’s unstudied prettiness, there was an unmistakable innocence.

Hey…

Adam pulled himself up short. What was happening to him? Who was he kidding, here? This woman? Innocent? She was a lawyer! She practised a profession that could draw the cynics and hard-hearts and opportunists of this world like blood drew sharks. She was Cherie’s sister, under her very different skin. And she was trying to win his daughter away from him.

So he’d better keep that fact firmly in the center of his mind. She was no innocent.

Okay, so maybe everything Meg had said so far was true. All that feeling spilled from her pretty lips and that suffering in her big gray eyes. But it was still a game, part of a strategy and a plan. Her dad wanted custody, and she was acting for him.

Adam understood a little more now about how Burt Jonas must feel. A chance to regain his lost daughter through her child. Yes, Adam understood the power of that hope. But had Meg Jonas deliberately tried to foster this empathy in him in order to strengthen the Jonases’ claim?

I’m the one that endured those weeks in the hospital after Amy’s premature birth, when her doctors thought that she might not make it, he reminded himself, while his hands tightened into fists.

I’m the one who endured it when Cherie took her for nearly three months and disappeared. I’m the one Cherie left her with when she disappeared again, leaving only that scribbled note in Amy’s diaper bag. “Adam, you take her. I can’t deal with her anymore.”

I’m the one who’s had her for the nine months since Cherie abandoned her: caring for her, loving her, watching her learn and grow.

And I’m the one who had to face those test results four-and-a-half weeks ago, telling me my baby girl is seriously ill…

Meg hadn’t missed the steel in Adam Callahan’s voice when he said his daughter’s full name, and she knew that Dad and Patty were kidding themselves if they thought this man would give his little girl up without a fight.

Hell, she’d been kidding herself in the exact same way a week and a half ago when she’d drafted the legal letter she’d sent to him, after what seemed like hours of phone calls between herself here in Philly and Dad and Patty in San Francisco, talking about what they wanted. They’d still been reeling from the revelation that Cherie had had a child.

She wasn’t kidding herself anymore.

The trouble was, Adam Callahan was nothing at all like what she had imagined. Nothing at all like Cherie had described, one of only two times they’d spoken about him together, nearly two years ago. The phone call from her sister was carved into her memory. It had come out of the blue after the usual months of silence, made from some gas station phone booth in a midwestern town whose name Meg couldn’t even remember. Maybe Cherie hadn’t been that specific. Somewhere in Indiana?

She’d sounded wild that night. Giggly. Happy. In love. Out of control. Some guy on a motorcycle who sounded dangerous and bad. She’d called him by some in-your-face nickname. Slash?

“He’s in trouble with the law, but I don’t care. He takes me places, Meg, heights I didn’t know existed. He makes me quiver. My modeling? That’s meaningless. I just want to be with him, travelling, forever, on the back of his bike, feeling the air. I don’t care about anything else. And neither does he…”

The second time Cherie had talked about him was over a year later, and this time she’d made more sense, seemed more grounded. The guy had turned out to be “bad news.” He’d “nearly killed” her in a motorcycle smash, then walked away. A lot had happened…Baby Amy, for one thing, although typically Cherie hadn’t mentioned that. Who could fathom her motives there? She’d just claimed vaguely that Meg didn’t need the details…But finally, “I realized he wasn’t going to change.” She had signed with a new, much better agency and she was getting back into modeling. The guy was history.

None of that sounded like the man who sat in Meg’s office right now. Oh, Adam Callahan looked like a man who could make a woman quiver, all right. No problem there. And he rode that big black motorcycle.

But the rest of it didn’t gel. He was a doctor, and he wasn’t just some guy who fathered a child with a woman then shrugged off the responsibility and moved on. It was already very apparent that he was passionate about keeping his little girl. Look at the suppressed tension in him now! The power of it mocked the carefully chosen decor of Meg’s office.

She was proud of the restful, creative touches she’d given to her work environment. The shelf of knickknacks, mainly hand-carved Inuit animals in wood and stone. The botanical prints with their earthy, natural colors. The soft, comfortable leather of the sage-green chairs.

But the strength of what Adam Callahan felt and the strength of who he was as a man made this office suddenly feel like a prison, and Meg couldn’t even pretend to herself that she was fully in control anymore. It had begun the moment she saw him, and continued during that disturbing instant when their hands had touched over the coffee. The sense of a connection that went beyond logic and reason.